An Afghan Gives His Own Account of U.S. Abuse

By CARLOTTA GALL

Published: May 12, 2004

KABUL, Afghanistan, Wednesday, May 12 — A former Afghan police colonel gave a graphic account in an interview this week of being subjected to beating, kicking, sleep deprivation, taunts and sexual abuse during about 40 days he spent in American custody in Afghanistan last summer. He also said he had been repeatedly photographed, often while naked.

"I swear to God, those photos shown on television of the prison in Iraq — those things happened to me as well," the former officer, Sayed Nabi Siddiqui, 47, said in the interview on Sunday at his home in the village of Sheikho, on the edge of the eastern town of Gardez.

His account could not be independently verified, but members of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission accompanied a reporter during the interview and said his story matched the one given to them last fall, shortly after his release and long before the abuse at the Abu Ghraib near Baghdad came to light.

The commission, which was set up by the transitional government of President Hamid Karzai in 2002 and receives money from the United States Congress and other foreign donors, has in recent months received 44 complaints against various actions by American forces.

Those include several on the abuse of detainees who have alleged rough and degrading treatment, including being stripped naked and doused with cold water, even before the pictures of prisoner abuse emerged in Iraq. Afghan military and police officials say they have heard similar stories from detainees and their families.

After queries to the Pentagon about Mr. Siddiqui's case, the United States embassy in Kabul issued a statement early Wednesday, saying, "The U.S. military has launched an immediate investigation."

It quoted the American ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, as saying, "To the best of our knowledge this is the first time anyone in the military chain of command or the United States Embassy has heard of this alleged mistreatment."

But a member of the human rights commission said members had mentioned details of Mr. Siddiqui's case, apparently the first complaint of sexual abuse from a detainee in Afghanistan, to American military officials here last year.

Mr. Siddiqui says that he was wrongly detained on July 15 after he reported police corruption and that someone then accused him of being a member of the Taliban.

He showed a Defense Department letter detailing his stay, as detainee BT676, in a jail at the Bagram air base outside Kabul from Aug. 13 to 20, 2003, and his release after it was decided that he posed "no threat to the U.S. Armed Forces or its interest in Afghanistan."

Mr. Siddiqui said he had also been held for 22 days at the American firebase at Gardez, where United States infantry and Special Forces are based, and where he said the worst abuses occurred. He then spent 12 days at the Kandahar air base in southern Afghanistan, and finally about a week in Bagram, he said.

He described being humiliated repeatedly during his detention in all three places.

"They were taunting me and laughing and asking very rude questions, like which animal did I like having sex with, and which animal do you want us to bring in for you to have sex with," he said of his time in Gardez.

"They were mimicking the sounds of a sheep, a cow and a donkey," he said, "and asking which one I would like to have sex with. They kept insisting, and they were kicking me so much that eventually I said a cow."

"And they made insults about our women," he added. He said the American interrogator, through a translator, had taunted him, asking: "Do you know that your wife and daughter are prostitutes now?"

"The Americans were asking this and the translators were translating, and they were all laughing," he said. "And I was in my full police uniform with insignia showing my rank."

More than once, he said, soldiers inserted their fingers into his anus. He said one had touched his penis and asked, "Why is this unhappy?"

"There was a translator there," Mr. Siddiqui went on, "and I said, `Maybe because I am away from home.' "

"Every time, they were laughing and putting their fingers in my anus and throwing different colors of beams of light in my eyes, and they were putting their feet on my neck," he said. He knelt and pressed his head to the floor to show how the soldiers had put their boots on his neck.

Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of United States forces in Afghanistan since last October, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had not heard of the allegations but that "I take those accounts very seriously."

"There is some potentially criminal behavior in there," he said.

The main detention center is at the Bagram air base. It is not clear who was in charge of the detainees at the remote bases when Mr. Siddiqui was in custody. The United States infantry and Special Forces have used the Gardez firebase, but General Barno said the officials responsible in Gardez at that time could have been "other than military," a term often used here to refer to the C.I.A.